


Split the Night into Two

by aheshke



Category: StreetSlam: Wishes of a Broken Time - Leon Langford
Genre: Because I can, F/F, Not Canon Compliant, Snippets, Superheroes, and add an OC for good measure, and obsess over a throwaway line at the beginning of the book, hey f/f shippers you can read this without knowing anything about the canon ;), watch me obsess over two background characters who had actual chemistry ok, wlw
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-27 19:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21124070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aheshke/pseuds/aheshke
Summary: Stealing a book from a library wasn't supposed to end with being frozen to a wall by a hot superheroine, but things haven't been going Claire Davidson's way since the night she met Maria Cameron. The book holds a dark secret about Titan Force and its legion of supers, and time is running out before its villainy can be ended for good.





	1. The Library

Claire RozenCrests Davidson’s mission had never been simpler: Sneak into a library and steal a book. Of course, there was a caveat: She had to sneak into the library from the roof, after running into pesky things like security guards and an infuriatingly hidden access to the restricted archives in the basement.

It was shaping up to be a “climb the brick with crumbling mortar and just think about the money” sort of day. 

The latch to the rooftop door was secured not only by a lock, but also an alarm and both were easily disarmed with lockpicks and her favorite portable alarm jammer, respectively. And with that, Claire slipped into the library easily, enjoying the air-conditioned service hallway after having to scale the side of the building in the dead of Texas summer. All in all, fairly normal activities for a treasure hunter, but it had been a while since she had to steal from a university (not including that one time when she pretended to be a culinary arts major just to go to an evening gala and eat gum paste lilies like goddamn medieval royalty, despite not knowing what ganache really is).

Her instructions were to steal a book tucked away in the depths of the library archives and almost certainly defended by much more than a latch and a simple alarm, at least if the government had any say about it. A clatter from the stairwell below made her slip back into the shadows, or at least as much of a shadow as the flickering fluorescent lighting allowed.

Not for the first time that night, Claire thanked the fates that she had decided to wear the suit with a cloaking device.

Additional rolling clatter from below: a figure in a uniform, pushing a cart, one of the janitorial staff, moving to the service elevator.

Claire waited until they had entered the service elevator and then she quietly made her way down the stairwell, all the way to the bottom. She had to stop once or twice and activate the cloaking mechanism when another uniformed person entered the stairwell, so lost in thought that they probably wouldn’t have noticed her even if she hadn’t made herself look like part of a concrete wall.

A faint buzzing sound greeted her ears as she finally arrived at the bottom: an emergency exit to her left and a heavy-looking metal door to her right, from which the buzzing sound emanated. Claire reached around to her backpack and took out her scanner. It was small and deceptively light, but Claire had designed it herself and knew that it was more advanced than it seemed. Switching it on, she turned back to the door and scanned it, as well as an even ten feet to either side. Behind the door was a simple motion-activated alarm rigged to send a signal to a security room somewhere on the floor above her. More complicated was the pressure alarm, which would go off the moment the door was opened or if a person stepped on a single floor of the room.

Time for the key cracker.

Claire grinned. She loved that thing.

This device looked a bit like a handheld radio crossed with a smartphone, cobbled together by people who had never taken an engineering design class before, but it was the brainchild of Claire and Colton and hadn’t failed her once in five years. She made herself comfortable on the floor and started hacking into the alarm systems, twiddling between the screen and wires and always (always) keeping an ear out for anyone from the stairwell.

A half-hour passed before she figured out how to bypass the pressure alarm (the motion sensor had been deactivated within two minutes—typical for most academic institutions, which tended to have lax security measures, especially in Texas). Stretching her arms, she picked up the scanner again, just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

No alarms.

_Perfect. _

Before the mission began, she had made a copy of a generic security badge for the library and this is what she used now to enter the room, carefully holding the handle to ensure that the metal door closed behind her with nothing louder than a soft _click_.

This room was colder than the outside, only lit by faint fluorescence lights, and dry enough that Claire could feel her hair growing more staticky by the minute.

It was plain in its design, sterile and filled with multiple locked glass and metal cases. The locks were simple pinpads, but now Claire needed to figure out which case held the book she needed and to get out before security made their rounds again, roughly in another half-hour.

Her client had told her it was hard-bound, with gold runes embossed on a brown leather cover, and heavier than it looked, as it was said to be only somewhat larger than a Moleskin notebook. Perhaps if Claire had been gifted with supersight or x-ray vision, she’d be able to figure out which case was correct, but alas, she had been gifted with tons of money and a personal lab, courtesy of her father’s business and supplemented with her own income.

Time for the scanner again.

The screen output was grainier than eyesight would have been, but a few taps later Claire had modified it to look for gold atoms, which winnowed her choices down to three cabinets that might have it: One in the top back corner, one conveniently just to the left and bottom from where she stood, and then one to the right of a glass case that doubled as a table, judging by the paperwork littering its top.

Five minutes later, she had figured out that the closest cabinet held a gold statuette, too small to be worth the hassle of stealing and finding a fence, and the one near the glass case had to be too large to be a book, possibly a box of some sort and while pretty, also pretty uninteresting to her wallet.

That left the one that she was too short to reach without a stepstool, dammit.

Absentmindedly, she checked her grippy gecko shoes, making sure the soles were still sticky. It was tricky, climbing up the flat metal and glass surfaces to reach the case that had to be fifteen feet off the ground. It was even trickier to do it while manipulating the key cracker, but at last she held the book in her hands.

It was slim but very heavy, heavier than a leather-bound book that small should be, and it felt warm with its own heat despite the chill of the basement. Claire knew a few languages, but runes were beyond anything she had ever studied, so she shrugged and tucked it in her backpack.

Fifteen minutes left.

“Stop what you’re doing, and hand the book over,” said a voice from below.

Claire peered down (a trick given how tucked up she was), and saw a young woman in some sort of spandex suit emblazoned with a Titan Force badge, her fists raised. The lights were too dim and Claire hadn’t activated her night vision contact lenses, but she made out dark hair and dark eyes, and brown skin. She had very serious eyes and if Claire knew anything from her previous run-ins with Titan Force, that meant they hadn’t sent a bumbling kid after her this time. Dammit. Claire could try to get away by climbing, but she hadn’t met this particular member of Titan Force yet and, as this was the first woman they had sent after her in years, she was _curious_. (The last person who had confronted her so seriously was Devin, who turned out to be an utter asshole even if his kisses were quite nice and she had been rather relieved when he broke up with her to go on some Eurotrip with his dad and had returned with a new girl on his arm and a marginally better attitude.)

Claire lightly hopped down near the woman, who still had her fists up and watched her warily. Up close, Claire could see dark freckles dusting her face and a strange set of symbols next to the Titan Force badge that she could guess meant higher rankings of some sort. And she was incredibly short—Claire had almost half a head of height over her.

Claire raised her eyebrows and felt a smile curve her lips. “Aw, Titan Force sent someone new! How nice. I don’t believe we’ve met? I’m Claire.” She took advantage of the surprise on the super’s face to finish tightening her backpack straps; she had a feeling things were about to get interesting.

The woman didn’t lower her arms a fraction. “Maria,” she said stiffly. “You must be the thief.”

“So formal! I prefer Claire, actually. Well met, _Maria_. You’re a much prettier sight than _Streetslam_. How’s that asshole doing, anyway?” Claire started to angle herself back to the stairwell.

“Stop stalling and hand the book over.”

“Hmm, let me think: no.” Claire pushed off against the cabinets and leapt over Maria’s head to the next row of cabinets, and then hopped from there to the next row. Whatever Maria’s superpowers were, Claire wasn’t interested in being their direct target.

She felt the temperature in the room drop by several degrees and then her ankles _yanked_ and her viewpoint had inverted upside down. Her head smacked with a dull thud into metal. Groaning, Claire pulled herself up to free her pinned ankles.

Ice, frosty white and at least an inch thick, bound her ankles to the metal, leaving her to dangle helplessly.

The source of the ice hopped down from the opposite row of cabinets, and even from this angle Claire could see the irate expression on Maria’s face and her hands held up like she was in a martial arts sparring match.

“Hello again, Maria,” Claire said cheerfully, even as she felt blood rushing to her head. “Or do you prefer to be called _La Helada_? Quite a nice superhero name, I must say. It’s memorable.”

“Give me the book, now, before I just take your entire backpack,” Maria said.

“Thieving from the thief?” asked Claire, subtly moving her hand to her collar to activate one of her many, many backup plans. “Rather forward of you to pin me like this. I usually prefer a dinner date first, darling.”

Maria’s face noticeably reddened and she clenched her hands. “Shut up.” With her unclenched hand, she reached for the clasps of Claire’s backpack, fumbling with their locking system and accidentally brushing up against Claire’s back.

“Wow, and feeling me up? I don’t know if this should be considered police brutality or blatant antagonistic flirtation.”

Right as Maria’s hands finally reached the correct set of clasps that would unlock access to the book, Claire’s boots turned red-hot and shattered the ice. Claire had been prepared and ducked and covered at the last moment, but Maria was not and was thrown several feet away, sans-backpack. Claire rolled as she landed on the floor and was up on her feet and running for the exit, calling behind her, “You’ll need to be cleverer than that to steal from a thief, dearie.”

The glowing green sign of the exit door was finally in her sights and she vaulted over the glass-covered artifact tables towards it, idly wondering if the sounds of their fight had finally alerted the campus security and tripped the alarms in the library. Then again, they _were_ campus security and notoriously lax once their first safety measures were cracked. She was probably fine.

Images of a fat check, made payable to the RozenCrests Davidson Engineering Lab, flashed through her mind. She might even get to replace her old stick welder this time around.

Claire was mere inches from reaching for the door handle when an attack from the side slammed her into the wall, arms and legs pinned by yet more ice.

_Fuck. _

Maria appeared along a trail of ice in a move that Claire had only seen before at the Winter Olympics, looking a little bit mussed and with some unfortunate cuts on her pretty cheeks and along the side of her forehead. Claire’s mind unbiddingly pointed out that her current predicament would have fulfilled a highly specific item on her bucket list, had Maria not looked like a particularly murderous Elsa and if she weren’t, you know, tied down by literal ice.

Claire mentally ran through her options. Her backup plans all required at least one arm or leg free, so that was a nope. Unless she wanted to activate her “only in case of impending death” option via her mouth, which didn’t sound pleasant and so, hard pass. Pinned like this, she couldn’t activate anything by using her backpack as the trigger, so that left one option: Her sass.

“We seem to keep running into each other,” Claire commented as Maria reached her, aiming directly for access to the backpack. She was close enough now that Claire could see the catch in her breath, her face flushed as she fumbled with the clasps yet again, now somewhat impeded by Claire’s greater height and also the backpack being pinned against the wall. Even this close and on her tip-toes, Maria seemed to be deliberately avoiding eye contact.

Claire had never been able to stand it when anyone ignored her and she especially couldn’t let _La Fucking Helada_ ignore her of all people, so she tried again. “You know, the last time someone pinned me like this, there was a lot more physical action.” She looked down at Maria with a quirked brow.

“I’m sure,” Maria muttered with an eyeroll, now strategically aiming under Claire’s armpit to get at the backpack.

“Yeah, and it might shock a star pupil of the uptight, hoity-toity Titan Force just how much tongue was involved,” Claire said, deliberately boring a hole into Maria’s head with her eyes and willing her to fumble, just a little. “You don’t want to remove my mask and find out, even just a little?”

Maria sighed and started counting quietly back from ten in Spanish but didn’t stop with the backpack, damn her. They both heard the click of the final clasp coming unlocked and the top flipping up against Claire’s head to reveal the book nestled on the top. To her credit, Maria didn’t even stop to gloat, but snatched the book and was out the exit door between one breath and the next, leaving Claire to melt in silence.

Claire wished she had remembered to ask for her number because hey, you missed all the chances you didn’t take, right?

Either the basement itself couldn’t escape the Austin summer or _La Helada_ apparently made quick-melting ice on purpose, but Claire had freed herself and escaped to the stairwell well before campus security arrived to notice the mess. Unfortunately, Maria and the book were long gone back to the precious Titan Force Headquarters, and Claire was left to admit that yet again, those assholes had bested her.

Well, not entirely: Her scanner picked up the tracker she had stuck to Maria’s skin during their fight, showing the super moving at a rapid pace to the center of the city.

With a chance at knowing the location, she had not yet exhausted all possible moves on the gameboard. Safely up on the roof, Claire looked up at the smog-faded stars and laughed.

A few days later, a post-it was stuck to the bottom of Maria’s coffee before she picked it up at her most-frequented shop, thanks to the simple skills of stalking and mild bribery of minimum-wage employees.

“_I’ve been thinking of you since our last date and considered that you might be interested in something of mine in exchange for something of yours. You don’t strike me as being as much of a stubborn ass as Devin, so I hope you might consider. You know I like to spend my Friday evenings in libraries. _

_Donde el instante brilla y se repite._

_-C.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poetry line in the letter from In Her Splendor Islanded/Aislada en su splendor by Octavio Paz and means “Here is the moment burning and returned”. A reference to Claire and Maria’s canonical love of poetry.


	2. The Lab

_I don’t know how you got this note to me and I don’t really care but the book is off the table. I can talk other sorts of trades. It might be worth our while. 12 AM this Friday. Try not to be slow. _

_– M._

_P.S. “Pour le commerçant, l'honnêteté elle-même est une spéculation de lucre.”_

“You’re officially obsessed,” Colton observed when he entered Claire’s lab a few days later. She had torn down an old blueprint covering a sizeable portion of the wall and was in the process of mapping everything she possibly knew about Titan Force and Maria, alias _La Helada._ It resembled a small but colorful spiderweb, with photos of Maria and Devin and other Titan Force supers nestled like so many trapped flies.

“I’m not obsessed,” said Claire, only pausing from the documents she was reading to spare her brother a passing glance. “Do I have a crush? Hmm, quite possibly, but it will pass, like they always do. No, I’m simply performing a root cause analysis to figure out how an ice witch bested my designs when Devin _fucking_ Maxwell aka _fucking Streetslam_ couldn’t.”

“Uh-huh,” said Colton, slouching on his arm rests, sounding skeptical. “And that also explains why you’ve suddenly gained an interest in Spanish and French poetry?”

Claire slapped a manila folder shut. “Of course.”

“And planning library dates?”

“I prefer the phrase, _bribery liaison location_, but, sure, whatever you wanna call it.”

Colton rapped the work bench with his knuckles until Claire met his eyes. They crinkled at the edges in amusement, but Claire knew him well enough to know that he was concerned. “Just promise me that she won’t be another Avery or Sam or Devin, please? I’m getting tired of picking up the pieces when they inevitably break your heart.”

“I’m fairly sure she doesn’t see me as anything more than a nuisance. I’ll be fine.” Claire noted his dark circles and an almost imperceptible twitch in his left hand. They had the same fine, straw-colored hair, but today his was mussed, as if he hadn’t brushed it in a few days. “Maybe you should let me take care of you for a while instead of worrying about me, alright? How are your spoons?”

Colton yawned. “Not many left, but I’ll get back to my room just fine on my own. I just had to know why you had suddenly stopped sleeping upstairs again.”

She smiled and patted his shoulder. “Only for a few more nights, I promise. I’m _so close_ to making sure she never beats me again.”

“Unless you want her to,” Colton said, waggling his eyebrows. Claire rolled her eyes at him. “Need any help with your ‘Don’t Let the IcyHot Lady Win’ stuff? I promise I finished my homework, like, hours ago,” he added.

“Hmm.” Claire turned away from her extensive (okay, _obsessive and somewhat stalkerish_) documents on Maria and unrolled a few blueprints she had shoved aside earlier that morning. “Wanna help me figure out the thermodynamic math? I could use another genius to make sure all my designs check out before I break into the Titan Force HQ.”

Colton eagerly reached for the blueprints, whistling low as he looked them over. “Sure thing!” The rest of what she had said apparently only caught up with his hearing after a lag. “_Break into the Titan Force HQ?!_”

“What, like it’s gonna be hard?”

“No, like I think my sister is suddenly intent on a very quick and painful death. What the actual hell, Claire?”

Claire waved him off, ignoring his wide-eyed stare. “_Please_, I’ve broken into tons of government buildings and more dangerous places run by freaking mafiasos and might I remind you that their most powerful super is goddamn Devin Maxwell? This’ll be a cakewalk.”

“_Suuuure_,” Colton drawled. “Might I remind you that you’ve never faced down more than like two supers at a time because they don’t think you’re that serious of a threat. I’m fairly sure they’re gonna treat a cat burglar on their own turf very differently.” He tapped his fingernails on the bench. “You’ve had a lot of questionable ideas in the past for how to get paid, but I think this might be the most questionable one yet. Maybe you should just, I dunno, take a leaf from our pesky Ice Witch and let it go this time? It’s not like she decided to pursue you further after she got what she wanted.”

She snorted and flopped into a chair. “I wouldn’t say that, based on our messages. She does want something out of me, though apparently it’s not valuable enough to swap for the book. And our budget is kinda low at the moment, even with help from Dad; I really need that commission money.”

“Aww, passing notes to your crush in addition to library dates? That’s just precious. Please tell me you sign them with little heart doodles next to your initials.”

“No!” She could feel herself flushing. “Though we have taken to ending each message with a line of poetry for that pretentious noir aesthetic. She likes a lot of Baudelaire for whatever reason. I’m a Rumi and Gibran gal myself.”

“Aw, such old fuddy-duddies. You should see if she’d like anything by my homegirl Sheila Black, who, might I mention, is a disabled activist who is still very much alive and breathing and writing new content, unlike those dusty-ass men.”

“Maybe. Anyhow, back to the thermodynamics: What do you think?”

Colton sighed and rolled his chair back from the bench. The dark circles seemed somehow deeper from this angle, and Claire resisted the urge to walk over and hug him because she knew he wouldn’t like that on a day like this one. Mentally she reminded herself to tweak his aids a bit once this admittedly harebrained-yet-necessary mission was finally done and she could afford the expensive upgrade.

“I still think this is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea _buuuuut _if I can’t stop you from trying it, then I might as well make sure you have a decent chance of not dying in the attempt. Gimme a calculator and a notebook and then shush.”

Claire got his supplies and ruffled his hair before plopping it all in his lap. “You’re the best! This is why you’re my favorite brother!”

“That’s not saying much if I’m your only brother,” he pointed out, clicking his pen a few times before rapidly jotting down notes.

“Doesn’t matter, darling; you’re still my favorite person. And hey, Colton?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

_As our initial meeting wasn’t enough to convince you, allow me to sweeten the deal: I’ll discuss something this time that I’m sure you’ll find irresistible. Same time, same place? “My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”_

_– C. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maria's quote is by Charles Baudelaire and basically means, "For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation."


	3. The Heist

_Irresistible? Well, I suppose I might be intrigued._ _– M. _

_P.S. “La lengua no tiene hueso, pero corta lo más grueso.”_

Everything had gone wrong pretty much from the moment Claire had stepped foot into the Titan Force Headquarters until she had found herself cornered on a rooftop at 3 AM, slowly dripping blood onto the book.

She and Colton had argued for hours about her best means of entrance, especially after he shot down her ideas of crawling through the ventilation shafts (_Too cliché_), climbing down the exhaust chimneys (_What, like Santa Claus? Also that’s a good recipe for chemical burns, Claire_), and straight-up walking through the front entrance, which happened to be attached to the Texas Memorial Museum (_They’ll be expecting someone who looks like you with a mask on so don’t be silly_).

Instead, they went for what Colton affectionately called Operation Indiana’s Crusade, which meant Claire sneaking into a basement museum exhibit at its most deserted hour and cutting right into the floor with a laser blade she had invented herself and for copyright reasons couldn’t call a Light Saber.

“I’m so banned from this museum _for life_ and I hope you’re happy, Colton,” she said into her headset. “There’s a catfish staring right at me with the judgiest expression on its face. It’s promising to avenge this place and its fried brethren.”

Even with the audio crackling, she could tell his sigh was highly exasperated. “Look, would you rather look at the exhibits we’ve visited six times already or would you rather find out where the book is quickly, with minimal damage to your person?”

She finished making the cut and paused before lifting the door to her improvised entrance to the Titan Force Archives, (at least, that’s what was supposed to be beneath her, if her sleuthing was correct). “Dude, I love you, but I hate that you’re right.”

She jumped down and immediately landed on a person in the room below. Even before she could roll off them, they wheezed, then gasped, which was a hardly surprising reaction for someone who just had the wind knocked out of them by a cat burglar jumping through the ceiling. Luckily, they were alone. With moments to spare until they would recover and call for reinforcements or set off an alarm or worse, Claire snapped into work, binding the person (some nerd with curly red hair and glasses) with zip ties and fashioning a gag from the bandanna covering her hair. She left them wriggling in the most distant corner from the computer mainframe; someone would find them eventually.

“Claire, are you okay? Are you in?” Colton sounded worried.

“Yeah, I’m fine, just had my fall cushioned by an unexpected human, but I took care of it. Now, walk me through the hack.”

It took longer than either of them wanted it to take (there were more than a few listings for “magical leather-bound book”), but eventually they found what they thought was the right one, especially since only one singular _Maria C._ had logged it. 

“Alright, now get the damned book and get the hell out of there,” said Colton. He yawned. “I want to sleep.”

“You can go to sleep at any time.”

“While my sister is in grave danger of being electrocuted, set on fire, frozen, knocked unconscious, and pulverized into a pulp, though not necessarily in that order? No thank you, I’ll pass.” He yawned again.

“Aw, so sweet of you, ah wait—” Claire paused over the listing again, especially where it had started discussing the book’s contents. “There’s something weird about this book.”

“Can the weird thing wait? Time’s a-wasting!”

As she continued to read, Claire sat down slowly, memories of Devin and the other supers flashing through her head. “No, not really. This is big. Like, really big.”

“How so?” Colton still sounded tired and on edge, but even he apparently couldn’t restrain the curiosity in his question.

“Well, you know how we thought all the supers were just gifted with their powers? You know, ‘I’m like an X-man, baby, I was born this way hey’? And the government just let us keep thinking that? As it turns out, that’s bullshit. They’re all drinking this magical gunk called Titarium to get their powers and this book is apparently telling them how to enhance the gunk to make them even more powerful. Dude, I think we’re looking at human experimentation without a whiff of an IRB or even the Nuremberg Code anywhere.”

“Oh, shit.”

A cold weight, like ice, settled in Claire’s stomach as she read the next section. “Fuck, it gets worse.” Her mouth dry, she whispered, “_They’re giving this shit to children, Colton._”

* * *

Things went downhill further after their discovery, especially because they had got into an argument over whether or not they should still sell the book for lab funding or use it to build a case against Titan Force for illegal human experimentation. Claire, thinking about piles of bills, was all for getting funding and finding some other way to expose Titan Force. Colton, very predictably, wanted to expose Titan Force as soon as they possibly could.

It would be an understatement to say the conversation got _heated_.

They found a compromise right before Claire found the right platform of Titan Force’s enormous vault that supposedly held the book. It was uncannily cold and reminded her of the library archives, only larger than a football field and cathedral-like, with an enormous stained-glass window at one end depicting an angel slaying a demon. She shivered.

“Fine, we can make a copy,” grumbled Colton in her ear. “But I still think our claim would be stronger with the real deal. How’s it looking down there?”

Claire didn’t like the way her boots echoed so loudly and felt more uncomfortable by the minute. She whispered, “I still need to find the book, but I haven’t reached the right section yet. This place is so creepy.”

“Don’t give up now! You’re so close!”

It had probably only taken minutes, but it felt like a horribly long time had passed before she finally found the right section, which was an elevated platform with a very small bookshelf. Acutely aware of far too much time having already passed, she resisted the urge to peek at all the other books and snatched the right one, looking as old and rune-covered as it had so many nights ago.

“I’ve got it,” she breathed.

“Oh good, that means you can give it to me,” said a deep voice behind her. Heart thudding in her ears, she turned and looked up, and then looked up some more at the most enormous man she had ever seen in her life, with a thick, spiky mane of black hair and sideburns running along a narrow chin and muscular arms that rather resembled tree trunks.

Claire pasted on her blandest, _“I’m a harmless dumb blonde”_ smile and slowly started backing away. “Oh, have we met? I’m new here and was just asked to retrieve this, but silly me, they didn’t tell me anyone else needed it.” The vault walls were too high for the reach of her climbing gear but if she could get back into the narrow stairwell she had seen behind her, she might stand a chance against the man, who looked like his superpower could be best described as “being ginormous”. She inwardly cursed when she saw the nerd she had zip-tied earlier that night take a tentative step out from behind the man’s back.

She was so screwed.

Colton’s voice crackled in her ear again. “Claire, I dunno what exactly is happening, but get the hell out of there, _now._”

“I’m_ trying_,” Claire hissed, before making a mad dash for the stairwell, blood pounding in her ears almost as loud as the footsteps behind her, the sounds of the chase rebounding off the walls of the vault.

Her luck held and she managed to make to the stairs and climbed up and up and up, lungs burning, barely breaths ahead of her pursuers. She had just crossed the top step and had leapt for the walls to climb up, up, and motherfucking away from the Super Hellscape when a large hand grabbed her by the ankle and she fell back down the stairs, into a vice-like grip.

“Let! Me! Go!” She kicked her feet against the man’s chest, but she might as well have been trying to kick a concrete wall.

The man chuckled. “Oh, not a chance, little thief. Now, be a good girl before I have to snap your ribcage and file a mountain of paperwork explaining why it was necessary.”

“Claire? Claire?” Thank gods, her headset hadn’t been knocked askew by the scuffle. “Claire, if you can hear me, plan Z. Think: Plan Z!”

_Plan Z?_ Colton must really think she was in danger of impending death. And, well, okay, the man _was_ squeezing her in an uncomfortable way that made dark spots appear in her eyes.

Still, Plan Z was absolutely her least favorite plan in existence, even at risk of death, so Claire opted for Plan Y: She relaxed in the man’s grip and, not expecting that reaction, he let her slip down another precious few inches. With her free hand, she grabbed the man’s arm as leverage and with all her strength, she slammed the heels of her boots into the wall of the stairwell, bracing herself as the propulsion activated and she slipped from his grip at last.

Something sliced her arm and her side, hot and sharp, but she tucked the book into a pocket and popped her grappling gear, swinging away through the halls truly as if her life depended on it, aiming for the room with the judgy catfish and (she hoped) no ambush waiting on the other side.

“C-cl—” Her headset screeched and stuttered with Colton’s garbled voice. Apparently, her arm wasn’t the only thing Plan Y had damaged. “_Cla!_”

“Colton, I dunno if you can hear me but that was Plan Y and I am now fleeing for my life, be back soon, have book, love you.”

She kept climbing, doing her best to ignore the increasing ache in her arm as alarms blared behind her.

* * *

As it turned out, an ambush didn’t await her on the other side, but her arm grew progressively weaker despite the push of adrenaline, until she had to give up grappling and switch to running. She took a bad tumble while jumping between buildings and that was how she ended up bleeding onto a book at 3 AM while cornered on a rooftop by Captain Ginormous and His Goons.

“Little thief, you have one last chance to give me the book and come quietly before I decide all that paperwork is worth the trouble,” Ginormous said.

“If you kill me, you’ll have more trouble than just paperwork. You don’t know who I really am,” Claire wheezed, starting to think Plan Z might actually be a good idea, and not just because all the blood loss had made her light-headed.

Ginormous cocked his head at her. “Oh? Should we know who you are? Do tell, little thief.”

The absolute last voice Claire wanted to hear at that moment rang out across the roof. “Claire?”

Maria stepped forward with an uncertain glance at Ginormous and Claire watched the way the super’s expression shifted as she took in the way Claire was hunched protectively over the book at the end of a long trail of blood that she was long past the point of having enough energy to find scary. Maybe if she asked nicely, _La Helada_ would provide a more painless death. Claire smiled grimly. Death by Hot Ice Witch sounded a lot more pleasant than being crushed. Maria stepped even closer, until she crouched down and stared at Claire at eye level.

“Claire, you reckless pain in the ass,” she said softly. “You were never supposed to keep chasing the book. What the hell possessed you to do such a stupid thing?”

Through a dizzy haze, Claire wondered if Maria had been one of the children in the experiments, if she had even understood what they were doing to her when it happened, if she even cared that it was still going on. It was all so fucked up. She cackled without realizing it, the sound thin and shaky.

“It’s all so fucked up,” Claire repeated aloud. “What they’re doing—and the kids! The kids, Maria!” She swallowed thickly and tried to think clearly enough to make her words count, just in case Colton was still listening. “_Wrong._ Titan Force is wrong. Not about the money, not anymore.” She reached out a hand to Maria’s cheek and a part of her was selfishly glad to see Maria flinch when Claire’s blood smeared on her skin. “Do you even care that it’s wrong?”

A shadow passed over Maria’s face, but she reached out and took the book from Claire, the latter too dizzy to do anything but try to hold on until it was tugged from her grasp. Maria stood up and turned to Ginormous, who watched them with intense interest.

“Darius, I’ve got the book, now leave her alone.”

Ginormous aka Darius raised his eyebrows. “Now, now, that would be highly against protocol, Miss Cameron. At the very least, Aries will want her questioned.”

“I think Titan Force has done more than enough to her. She’s hardly our greatest threat at the moment, anyway. Just leave her be; she can’t do anything to us.”

“The little thief knows the truth and we don’t know who else she’s told already.”

“And what of it?” Maria lifted her chin and widened her stance in front of Claire.

It was impossible, so surely impossible, but _La Helada_ was trying to be _protective?_

Darius sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Look, kid. You have guts and you’re not annoying like Streetslam. I didn’t want to have to play this card but since you leave me no choice—”

He swung a fist. Maria nimbly dodged by rolling under and up into Darius’s space which, even in Claire’s daze of pain, seemed like a bad idea until she saw the ice crawling up his legs and heard him yell in pain, holding his arms to his body as frost crawled over his skin, turning it an abnormal bluish shade.

“Freezing my blood is going too far, you fucking freak!” 

“Then don’t try to hurt me, asshole.” There was a crack as a pipe on the roof burst and water started to flow at Maria’s feet. “Like I said, _leave her alone_.” Maria stared down the other Titan Force supers until they beat a hasty retreat.

“Aries will hear about this,” Darius spat. “Better give up on any dreams you had of being a captain, of the new research, of being anything more than an Ice Bitch playing lackey to her betters.”

Maria had turned back to Claire but paused at the vitriol being hurled at her back.

“You know, Darius, I’ve never liked you,” Maria said slowly. “You’re a bully and you’ve always been, even before Titarium gave you an advantage. I still remember when Emilio came back from his training in a stretcher and couldn’t move for a week. That was you, wasn’t it? And don’t tell me you had nothing to do with Samantha’s disappearance.”

“You have no proof.”

“_She was seventeen, you monster._” Maria’s voice shook with rage. “Seventeen. How can you even sleep at night?”

Darius snorted. “Booze and a Sleepy Sleepy Tag, just like everyone else. This is just part of the work and you’d be smarter to leave us to it.”

“No, I don’t think I will.” Maria twitched her fingers at him, almost imperceptibly. He gasped, clutching his chest and falling backwards. Maria turned away from the body and asked Claire, “We need to get out of here. Do you think you can move, or do I need to carry you?”

“Carrying sounds nice,” Claire breathed, still in disbelief at what she had seen and heard.

Maria made a makeshift stretcher out of ice and set Claire on it before maneuvering them both down to the streets, fortunately deserted at this late hour of night. The dark spots in Claire’s vision swam back and she fought to stay awake when Maria jostled her uninjured arm and said, “Hey. Hey, Claire. Stay with me. Where should I take you? Where’s safe?”

“St. David’s,” Claire murmured. It was so very hard to fight against the darkness in her vision when she felt so tired, so very, very tired. “St. David’s Hospital is safe.” It was all finally too much and she sank into blissful unconsciousness.

She woke up in a hospital bed, her arm and side heavily bandaged and Colton fast asleep in a chair beside her while machines beeped a steady rhythm. Maria was nowhere to be seen.

_Hey, so, this is awkward because I don’t know how to properly pass a note to someone who saved my life, but you missed our last meeting and I’m worried. I’d still like to work together, so if you get this, let me know you’re safe, okay?_ _“Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert.” _

_– C. _

(It took weeks before Claire finally accepted that Maria had fled Austin with the book and wasn’t going to return.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maria's Spanish quote essentially means, "Words are more powerful than weapons." Fitting, no?  
For those not in the know, IRB = Institutional Review Board that protects human subjects in research and the Nuremberg Code was a set of ethical principles for human experiments made after World War II.


End file.
